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A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

• heckerboy 10y ago
  I will say that if the US ever got a basic income, I wouldn't have a reason to kill myself anymore.
  • aminok 10y ago
    Living on money taken by force from others is an easy solution, but it is not an ethical one. If you feel like you have a reason to kill yourself, you need to find someone to talk to about this, not look to the government, and the fruits of its authority, for your salvation. It's not lack of resources that makes someone suicidal. It's a deficiency in your ability to address the challenges you face in your life. Again: the solution is to talk to someone. There are many who go through what you do, and there are many people out there who can help. You're not alone.
• golergka 10y ago
  That's a little surprising — with all discussions about basic income taking place, I assumed it is more of a left-wing thing. But what is even more surprising are arguments against it: social workers being laid off and other more complicated policies like minimum wage taking a back seat. With this kind of rhetoric, it's easy to believe that the real reason is the "welfare lobby" of government officials who don't want their bloated offices to close, indeed.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• aub3bhat 10y ago
  I think the reason for huge support behind Basic Income is failure of government in efficient allocation of its resources. The current generation with its experience with public education, spending on unnecessary wars and other poorly run government programs no longer trusts government to effectively deliver services. Thus Basic Income seems like a natural solution. I honestly would prefer a smaller government that reallocates resources, over Bernie Sanders style big government socialism.
  • rubyfan 10y ago
    Why does it follow that the answer to an inefficient government is to give that same government more power to redistribute wealth? Being a big inefficient government and redistributing wealth are not mutually exclusive.
    • jessriedel 10y ago
      It's important to distinguish between rights- and incentive-based objections to redistribution and efficiency-based objections to government spending. The government as an organization of humans is very inefficient and wasteful at accomplishing actual tasks (e.g., building bridges), but it's actually very efficient at redistributing wealth through pure transfers (e.g., the administrative overhead of social security is negligible compared to the amount redistributed). Thus the best objections are grounded in bad incentive effects or property rights, not the inefficiency of government.
      • rubyfan 10y ago
        I interpreted the parent comment is implying ineptitude by the government in delivering positive outcomes and my comment is in reply to that. If the regime is inept at delivering solutions why would we entrust it to take more by way of taxation to support a basic income. My comment is not about the efficiency or admin overhead of printing checks. It's about trust in government to deliver an outcome.
        • jessriedel 10y ago
          Trust obviously depends strongly on the task. I trust my dog to fetch the ball but not do my taxes, because he's a lot better at the former.
  • richmarr 10y ago
    > I think the reason for huge support behind Basic Income is failure of government in efficient allocation of its resources. Basic Income is interesting because (a) it removes the requirements for administration of social security and policing of fraud, and (b) because some people think increased automation/AI will create increased unemployment so a different approach would be beneficial. I'm not aware of evidence to support a view that poor implementation of particular social security programs is a driver.
• bontoJR 10y ago
  > Switzerland will hold a June 5 referendum on whether to give every adult citizen 2,500 Swiss francs (about $2,600) a month. Yeah and, for sure, it won't pass... considering how conservative we are, plus the legal side of the proposal is not so clear in where the money will come from.
  • sambe 10y ago
    This doesn't seem like enough for Switzerland - what do you think? Based on my experience this would be on the very low side. The previous vote on minimum wage was quoted as working out at around 4000CHF/month. Granted, most basic income proposals are on the low side - this just seems even lower than normal.
    • VeejayRampay 10y ago
      It seems low. I think this is what cashiers at Lidl or Leader Price actually make in Switzerland. Or rather, it's the urban legend in France that this how much a cashier in Lidl/Leader Price makes in Switzerland. Though this might be part of the whole "Everything is better in Switzerland" psyche prevalent in France (streets are paved in sheets of gold, etc).
      • AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
        The gold doesn't corrode or pothole - it's a better investment over the long term.
      • Kenji 10y ago
        4000 Francs is a de-facto minimum wage in Switzerland. Even the most basic jobs will earn you that much, usually. It's rare that you earn significantly less than that.
  • tribaal 10y ago
    Well, holding a referendum in Switzerland means 100k citizens agree to put it up for referendum, nothing more, nothing less. It's not some kind of endorsement of it as a good or feasible idea, unfortunately. As you point out, most pro basic-income people I've talked with here tend to hand-wave the "how do we pay for it" question as "implementation detail" or some idealistic rhetoric ("tax the rich more!") which is not encouraging me to vote in favor. I would be happy to give my vote to a proposal that included a budget proposition, or a rational analysis of feasibility. The current one doesn't (http://initiative-revenudebase.ch/initiative/ http://initiative-revenudebase.ch/initiative/)
• amelius 10y ago
  I'm still wondering about one thing: if everybody has a basic income, then who will be doing the dirty jobs like collecting our waste? Will the price for waste collecting go up? And will there then be a kind of economic "inversion", where the intellectual people prefer to work on interesting stuff at the expense of money, while the "non-intellectual" (need a better word here) people will make all the money doing the dirty jobs?
  • the-dude 10y ago
    Dirty jobs already are paid a premium. I would expect the differences to be amplified though, for good reason?
  • FiReaNG3L 10y ago
    It is already the case - go try and pursue a career in academia and see how much money you make compared to a plumber.
    • argonaut 10y ago
      In CS, if we include industry pure research, you make a lot more ;)
      • Roritharr 10y ago
        I'd wager that there are a lot of people that avoid a career in CS much more than a career in plumbing...
    • gjm11 10y ago
      Some intellectually satisfying jobs (academic, author, artist, ...) pay badly. But many others are well paid, and probably most of the best-paid jobs are (1) largely brainwork and (2) pretty interesting to do. Some not-very-intellectual jobs (plumbers are everyone's favourite example, which makes me suspect there aren't many others) pay pretty well. But most don't. Some jobs that usually pay pretty well: Software developer. Lawyer. Doctor. Quant. Corporate executive. Some jobs that usually pay pretty badly: Cleaner. Waiter. Shop-floor sales person. Bank cashier. I think these are more representative than comparing adjunct professors with plumbers.
• k-mcgrady 10y ago
  >> "But in the U.S., many liberals see it as naive and a distraction from more practical priorities, such as a $15 minimum wage and paid family leave." I can't see how they could believe this. First of all a minimum wage becomes unimportant as you should hypothetically have enough money to support the kind of lifestyle a minimum wage job would provide without working. Secondly, as it's no longer financially critical to them, people won't be as inclined to take on minimum wage type jobs - which will force the wage up anyway so that the business can attract employees. So it should take care of itself. As for paid family leave (I presume they mean maternity/paternity leave?) you won't need that as your basic income will ensure you still have money coming in. And if the company wants to retain your services after your leave they will offer it anyway. The key point in these examples is that even if you don't get a higher minimum wage or paid family leave it's no longer going to have a big effect on you as you have your UBI to rely on. Also, it doesn't seem to me like there is a left/right split on this elsewhere in the world. This leads me to believe that the problem is the highly partisan US political system. The right is obviously going to support UBI as it would significantly reduce government size - the left can't be seen to be agreeing with the right. I think it's a kind of childishly schoolyard thing you see a lot in US politics (he likes that so I don't).
  • mseebach 10y ago
    The biggest problem with the UBI debate is that few people explicitly name the amounts they imagine. You seem to imply a level near the minimum wage, but that's flat out impossible. The total US tax revenue is around $20k/year/person, so a realistic UBI is upper bounded at perhaps $2-300/month (full time at $15 is about $2,600/month) - and at 20% of total revenue, that would have to replace substantial portions of existing social programs to be viable.
    • k-mcgrady 10y ago
      I envision it as enough for someone to get by. So not enough for luxury expenditures. Basically food and shelter. I'm also looking at this from the perspective of someone in the UK who doesn't have to think of things like health care and education which changes things quite a bit. I'd say around $800 p/m per person would be plenty if you look at food and rent for a room in a shared apartment. Tax revenue should also stretch much further with a UBI. You could reduce huge inefficiency and lay off the majority of staff involved in welfare programs which would amount to massive savings.
• hasan459 10y ago
  affiliate marketing is a good way for basic income
• PlzSnow 10y ago
  People keep wanting to make Basic Income a thing but it is never going to become a thing. It has some good ideas, but it's too radical for mainstream consumption. The Bernie Saunders of ideas. And that's an important point, because there is a positive feedback reporting loop whereby people actually think it has support because it keeps getting posted on Reddit etc.
• elcct 10y ago
  Basic income will become new zero. That idea is retarded
  • dang 10y ago
    Your comments have been breaking the HN guidelines. Please (re)-read them and post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
• DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  The reason UBI has such broad appeal is that, well, people are able to do basic math. Take for instance the amount spent on the bank bailouts, which were supposedly done to help stimulate the economy. If you'd just let the banks fail, you could have spent the same money giving everybody a check for somewhere around 20K (the number is debatable). Hate poverty? The U.S. has spent more than 5 Trillion on it over the last few decades. That's another 20K or so per man, woman, and child. The national debt is closing in on 20T. Would you rather have a balanced budget and a check for 100K? (I understand the math is way fuzzy here. It's to make a point.) We're reaching the point where the average person who supports helping the poor can figure out that we could have just set up an endowment for each poor person when they were born and spent less money than this. And at the same time we would get rid of a lot of folks doing useless overhead simply because the system is so complex. For those reasons and more I like the UBI idea. But ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. We need about a thousand different experiments -- ran for 10 or 20 years -- before we can begin to start saying what might work or not work. When I look at other charitable causes (aid to Africa comes to mind first), the rhetoric got way out ahead of the actual results for many, many decades. Tons of time, effort, and money were spent on strategies that didn't work but sounded pretty cool. We'd be idiots not to recognize that this is the danger here too. The first question we have to ask is this: What is UBI? Is it a reliable income in place of a bunch of other services? Or is it in addition to a bunch of other services? The difference matters. Once that's defined, I sure would like to see if a majority of people doing nothing "rubs off" on ambitious, driven people. Or maybe it works the other way around. Maybe a small percentage of ambitious, driven people, in a society without external pressures, can persuade more and more folks to find meaning in helping others. Beats me. Sure will be fun to learn more. Slogans are great. Results are better.
  • cromulent 10y ago
    As it is such a massive societal change, some sort of testing and experimentation would have to be done, I think. The recent Freakonomics episode on the topic talked about a Canadian experiment "Mincome" from the 70s. There were some interesting results. Worth a listen. "FORGET: One of the findings was that high-school completion rates had increased, and we discovered that boys, in particular, in low-income families had been under a fair amount of pressure to become self-supporting as quickly as they could. When mincome came along, some of the families decided that they could allow their sons to stay in high school just a little bit longer. So instead of quitting school at age 16 and getting their first full-time job, these boys stayed in school until they were 18, until they graduated from high school and took their first full-time job a little bit later." http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mincome/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mincome/
• cromulent 10y ago
  When I think about it from a business perspective, the advantage is not just smaller government but workforce flexibility. If I only have 20 extra hours of work some weeks, there is no way I am hiring another person full time. With a basic income in place, I can hire someone at market rates just for those 20 hours without all of the stress for both parties. Still not perfect, but much better.
• raphaelj 10y ago
  A basic income could make low-pay jobs more interesting than ever, and companies could benefit from it. In most developed EU countries, a "social" income is given to unemployed people. In Belgium, it varies between 550€/month and 850€/month, depending on the situation. People lose this income as soon as they start to work, that means that a part-time job with an income of about 1000€/month is really unattractive. With a basic income, unemployed workers could be stimulated to accept this kind of low-pay jobs, as the pay will add up to their basic income. With the increase of productivity we got in the last 50 years, the hours worked by low-skilled workers must be lowered, or we will face endlessly increasing unemployment rates. An universal basic income can stimulate this.
• unsigner 10y ago
  I don't see how the government can be shrunk, short of violent collapse. UBI will be introduced, and not a single government program will be dropped, not a single government official laid off; wars, bailouts and $500 toilet seats will continue, but we'll have to tax, borrow or print a few more billions (or trillions, in the case of US-sized economies - I live in a small country).
• empressplay 10y ago
  Won't a basic income just increase inflation? Minimum-wage jobs would by necessity then need to pay more, which would then cause the costs of goods and services to go up, which would then make living more expensive, necessitating an increase in the basic income and so forth...? For example, say I'm a landlord. If everyone all of a sudden had an additional "base" income, why wouldn't I increase my rents to absorb at least a portion of that? Then, only people who had a job would still be able to afford to rent from me, while those on the basic income would be unable to afford it. I'm not out either way. So you would say you need to introduce legislation to stop me from doing that, but the free market would abhor that and likely accuse you of being a communist. So you can't. So I'm failing to see the point of the whole exercise?
  • ramblerman 10y ago
    > Minimum-wage jobs would by necessity then need to pay more The whole reason the debate is becoming so prominent now is just because minimum-wage jobs and even non minimum wage jobs will be replaced by robots/ai. The goods may even become cheaper.
  • adaml_623 10y ago
    You need to read some analysis of this before asking basic questions like that. There are factors like unemployment rate, tax, and government efficiency to consider.
  • crdoconnor 10y ago
    The cost of inflation is spread across the whole economy. The brunt will mainly be borne by those holding large liquid cash reserves and owning loans, not minimum wagers.
    • empressplay 10y ago
      I still think that until the real estate question is resolved it's all a moot point. Already-inflated property markets will just become more inflated.
      • 10y ago
• idiot99 10y ago
  There isn't huge support. Step out of the bubble... It's just the new generation of kids flirting with communism.
  • gjm11 10y ago
    I think you may not have it perfectly clear in your mind what "communism" means.
    • towlejunior 10y ago
      Truly, the most predictable of all replies.
    • idiot99 10y ago
      Perhaps you need to convince the public that having a large government handing out a specific allowance to everyone regardless of how hard they work, is somehow different to communism.
      • gjm11 10y ago
        So far as I can tell, "the public" has this perfectly clear. (Or at least as clear as "the public" ever has anything, which is not necessarily all that clear.) I think what you mean is that I need to convince you. I've no idea what (if anything) you would accept as evidence. Here's the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page on communism; feel free to check that the [...]s don't hide anything that changes the meaning. > [...] communism [...] is a[...] ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is the establishment of the communist society, which is a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money, and the state. Does a universal basic income cause, or require, common ownership of the means of production? Nope. The means of production stay largely in the hands of businesses (or, as the communists might say, of Capital). Does it involve the absence of social classes? Nope. Successful lawyers (say) will continue to have much, much more money and much higher social status than anyone who's largely dependent on basic income. Does it involve the absence of money? Nope. It depends on the continued existence of money. Does it involve the absence of the state? Nope. It depends on the continued existence of the state. Well, who cares what those pinko loons at Wikipedia say? Communism is whatever they had in the Soviet Union. How about that? Well, in the Soviet Union they had a centrally planned economy where the government told factories how many of everything to make, etc. Does a universal basic income cause or require that? Nope. Businesses continue to decide what to make and what to sell at what prices; individual consumers continue to decide what to buy. ("But a basic income would require a big government!" Well, kinda, in that the government would be taking in more tax and handing out more money. But that's got nothing to do with central planning. A basic income wouldn't mean that the government would do more of the work; if anything, it should be less because the BI would replace a bunch of other more complicated benefits that require more administrative work to make sure they're going to the "right" people.) In the Soviet Union they had a totalitarian state with secret police, gulags, etc. Does a universal basic income require that? Nope. Obviously. The Soviet Union had undemocratic politics where the Communists were always in power. Does a universal basic income require that? Nope. Obviously. "Communism" does not mean the same as "anything vaguely leftish that I don't like".
• cmdli 10y ago
  From the $1 trillon stated in the article, spread across 300 million people, each person would get around $3000 a year. That honestly doesn't seem like it would help a lot, considering it would replace current welfare systems. The Swiss proposal of around $2600 a month, implemented in the US, would cost nearly $10 trillion a year which doesn't really seem feasible. I don't think the problem with basic income is an ideological one, its a numbers one. There simply isn't enough money to implement it without massively increasing taxes.
  • felipeerias 10y ago
    The main problem with a general basic income is that it would be enormously wasteful, regressive and unfair. If you have a good economic situation, 250$/month is peanuts. If you are grasping for air, it won't be enough; even more so if it comes at the expense of getting rid of public programmes that can target concrete problems and leverage economies of scale. Other approaches (e.g. minimum guaranteed income for the jobless and tax credits for the working poor) look like a far better use of resources.
    • takno 10y ago
      If you're earning more you will effectively pay the money back in higher taxes, so the transfer will be much the same as for a minimum guaranteed income, but without the costly administration, confusing rules and moral judgement that come with minimum guaranteed incomes
      • rhino369 10y ago
        How much money is actually spent on the costs of administration that would actually be eliminated by UBI, which is mostly just qualification paperwork? You'd still need fraud prevention--people faking identities. You'd still paper pushers who coordinate payments and customer service. I can't believe this really would create all that much savings when averaged out over 330 million people.
        • takno 10y ago
• jasiek 10y ago
  Looks like this topic needs a serious longitudal study. This being a hot political topic virtually guarantees no one will conduct one.
• abhi152 10y ago
  The simple answer is : A subsidy of such large proportions is not economically viable for the Govt.
• ww520 10y ago
  The Fed engineers a slow inflation every year via interest rate control and gives the benefit of the newly created money to banks, the loan borrowers, and asset holders as rates lower than keeping inflation at zero. Since the money supply increases anyway, might as well give the new money as basic income to ALL people. At least the money will be spent directly by the people for economic activities, instead of indirectly via the loans and asset inflation. The Fed can raise interest rate to shrink the money supply for banks and borrowers while give more direct cash to expand the money supply via basic income. This can be in addition to the government's budget spending on basic income. An interesting outcome is the deflation of the asset bubble as rate increases. The money supply expansion via direct cash counters the deflation in economy. This should reverse the trend of the great wealth transfer to the asset holders in the last 20 years.
  • jfaucett 10y ago
    i agree with you, but am doubtful as to whether they'll do it. The gov't and its nearest banking buddies benefit enormously from the new money before it inflates outward across the economy and devalues.
  • ChrisLomont 10y ago
    The benefit is not given to the banks - the money is added through asset purchases on open market sales. The Fed owns more assets (usually Treasuries) and the bank has cash. If you want to get in on it, buy Treasuries. Next, the Fed avoid targeting zero inflation, because it's currently impossible to hit that number so exactly, and they desire to avoid deflationary spirals. The past 150 years has shown across hundreds of countries that the current solution is vastly better than the boom and bust cycles previous, and has also demonstrated the benefit of fiat over commodity (like gold). There are ample papers showing this in the econ literature, and is the primary reason not a single country tries to use previous methods. Next, new money is added through asset purchases, not giveaways, so it's erroneous to think this money can just be handed to individuals as cash, unless perhaps those individuals were selling assets to the Fed of equal value. Next, the target is usually around 2%, and the money supply is around 2T, resulting in 400B a year, or, 2K a year per adult, which is nice, but hardly a basic income. It's more like a tax break. It's hardly going to change wealth transfers, since most people will just consume it, and the wealth would go back to companies, mostly the ones you decry above. Finally, when the Fed targets low inflation, that would dry up the basic income, and I don't think giving people such a variable and uncertain income would do well for planning and stability. Soon people would clamor and elect politicians that guaranteed the Fed would pay X per year, defeating the entire mechanism the Fed uses to stabilize markets.
• gjm11 10y ago
  This article says it's talking about a universal basic income, and makes the usual point that a completely universal, no-strings-attached income is simple to administer, doesn't have poverty traps, etc. And then, towards the end where it starts looking at numbers, it starts saying things like > But by excluding 45 million retirees who already receive a basic income through Social Security, the cost falls to $2.7 trillion. And if the benefit is phased out for households earning more than $100,000 (that would be 20 percent of the U.S.'s 115 million households, or about 70 million people, assuming three to a household), the cost declines to about $2 trillion. You could confine the program to adults and shrink the price tag even more, possibly to as low as $1.5 trillion. Yes, you can reduce the amount paid out by making it not a universal basic income scheme any more. But that rather misses the point. (The correct thing to say here is: Yes, a universal basic income sufficient to keep everyone out of poverty would be really expensive. Taxes would need to go up a lot, which would leave wealthier people less well off than they are now. If you don't want a large-scale redistribution of wealth, then you don't want a BI scheme sufficient to keep everyone out of poverty. But you might still want to consider a BI scheme that's not sufficient to keep everyone out of poverty, to simplify and to reduce poverty traps. No one would have to be much worse off then. But it wouldn't be enough for anyone to live on, and would still need supplementing by other safety nets.)
  • newjersey 10y ago
    I'm one of the people who supports excluding people under the age of eighteen from basic income.
    • creshal 10y ago
      Most countries have dozens to hundreds of government programs (a dozen federal, a dozen per state, another dozen per city, …) to support parents of underage children. You'd get rid of a lot of administrative overhead by outphasing all of them in favour of including children into basic income (maybe at a fixed reduced rate if expenses are a concern).
      • dalore 10y ago
• lackingcaffeine 10y ago
  I think the idea of a basic income is really interesting though one aspect of it troubles me and I would be interested to hear HN's solutions to it. The trouble lies in the creative and economic relationship. If a substantial number of people reduce or stop their usual working hours and live off the income to pursue entirely creative activities, such as making a website or art, they are exempt from the usual capitalist status quo which forces a venture to be good, popular and eventually profitable (there is no standard of quality necessary as long as its overheads are not too high). This could mean a substantial number of people are neither creating wealth through work or taxable business. One counter-argument is that by freeing up people to pursue their interests, there will be more good businesses opened as well, which will be profitable in the long run. The other is that a person would not pursue a project that is not well-received for a long period of time due to negative feedback. Neither of these fully answers the problem though of what the system would do to stop people falling off the economic grid and the impact on GDP/taxable income this would have. Any thoughts?
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • rorykoehler 10y ago
    >This could mean a substantial number of people are neither creating wealth through work or taxable business. How is this any different than what we have currently? It could be argued that many employed persons are currently destroying wealth through unethical practices encouraged by profit/rent seeking that is prevalent in contemporary economy. A basic income as you have noted will also allow for people to open 'good businesses' without as much of a pressure to turn a profit. Ideally society would start to look down upon the "I work for <expletive>'s people/companies because I need to pay the bills" attitude that is pervasive today and people would start taking their responsibilities to themselves, their community and our greater environment more seriously.
    • lackingcaffeine 10y ago
      I don't agree that anything close to a majority a people are working unethically or for unethical ends. Most people are doing jobs that have some economic and societal function. This system works so well because if the product you are offering isn't needed by society then it can't exist. I'm just wondering what the consequences of this subversion will be. If everybody opens a "good business" that doesn't make a profit or is needed, the services we do need will be compromised and the money we take to build schools and hospitals will be reduced. The ethical net gain might be good, and society's impression of jobs may be altered but that doesn't answer the economic problem of how to encourage people to work in fields that are fiscally meaningful
• mcv 10y ago
  Interesting how this article spins Basic Income as something of particular interest to conservatives while liberals would object to it. I suppose that can help sell the concept to highly partisan anti-liberals, but I know plenty of liberals and progressives who strongly support Basic Income. The idea that the people employed in the bureaucracy managing the current mess of programs losing their job is a silly concern. Why should we keep paying people for unnecessary bullshit jobs? Why should we employ people to check and ensure that other people aren't secretly working? Let those people do something more productive. I would like Basic Income to be a bit more than $10,000 per year, though. Ideally, especially when the number of jobs available falls due to increased automation, I'd like the Basic Income to provide a comfortable income. People can and will still work to increase their income further, but when robots do more and more of the work for us, there's no reason to punish people for being unable to compete with robots.
  • ido 10y ago
    The sum also depends on how much robots will make stuff cheaper. Remember buying clothes and appliances/electronics before the 90s? These used to be major expenses, and much more expensive than today, adjusted to inflation (stuff got cheaper partially due to globalisation & partially greater automation).
    • throwanem 10y ago
      You mean the clothes and the electronics made by Asian indentured workers in conditions close to outright slavery? I mean, don't get me wrong, I participate in the modern economy as much as the next guy, and the man who eats meat is brother to the butcher. But let's not get starry-eyed imagining that robots make our trousers and smartphones.
      • CaptSpify 10y ago
        The idea is: They will. We're getting more and more automated every day. I think looking at and talking about UBI at this stage is much better than waiting until there aren't any more jobs left, and deciding we should have done something in the past. Lets experiment now, and get ahead of the curve.
• Overtonwindow 10y ago
  Negative. Those with money will fight like hell to keep from giving it up. However if by some chance/miracle a guaranteed income is ever instituted, it will become a political football, as politicians and advocacy groups seek to continuously push it higher and higher. Instead of a money handout, I would rather support money in exchange for public works and service. I don't believe handouts without some kind of exchange will ever really work.
  • dsr_ 10y ago
    The primary problem with a guaranteed employment program is the proliferation of edge cases: - I want a job, but I have no transportation - I want a job, but I have no skills - I want the money from a job, and I'm willing to show up to a job, but I never actually do the work. If you fire me, I will go get another guaranteed job. - I show up to the job and do the work, but my manager hates me and fires me. I guess I will go get another guaranteed job. - I show up to the job and do the work, but all the managers in this town have an unspoken agreement that they will report people of my (skin color, gender, orientation, whatever) as not doing the work, so I have been fired multiple times. - Bureaucracy managing the guaranteed jobs program replaces the bureaucracy managing the programs eliminated by Basic Income. I'm in favor of more spending on maintenance and public works, but I don't think a guaranteed jobs program will work as well as basic income.
    • Overtonwindow 10y ago
      Good point.
• zamalek 10y ago
  Although I advocate the empowerment of the impoverished, this looks like a very fundamentally flawed idea that would actually harm those it sets out to help. We need a different approach. When you give everyone in the economy a $10000 basic income you drive demand without driving supply. This graph[1] demonstrates how we estimate the relationship between the two, as well as price. As you'll notice, an increase in demand without an associated increase in supply results in an increase in prices. Essentially we might expect that over time the $10000, with market forces as the causation, will become the new N=0 point. Your basic salary becomes worthless. Any economic freedoms that you have created are fleeting in nature. A stricter socialist approach seems to be the better one: instead of investing that money into people's pockets, you invest it in job creation in services that assist these people. For example: aggressive funding of soup kitchens. The poorest of the poorest might not have money in their pockets, but it might be possible to provide even advanced (e.g. internet) services to them in such a way that they don't require money. This solution conveys no economic freedom - an ingredient for misery. Point is: I don't know and honestly, we don't know. Helping the impoverished is one of the most important goals of our race; but racing into poorly thought out solutions might result in the impoverished being no better off in the long run. I'd love to hear some counterarguments because the basic salary, at least superficially, has the attractive quality of being simple to implement. [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/Supply-and-demand.svg/2000px-Supply-and-demand.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/Su...
  • MaulingMonkey 10y ago
    What's the net economic difference between giving someone $5, which they then spend on soup, and spending $5 to buy soup on their behalf? None. Same for spending $10000 on someone's behalf via services, versus simply giving them $10000 which they then spend on the same services. Who holds the taxpayer provided money when making the final sale for goods or services is moot. In both cases you're driving up demand, which is what in turn drives up supply. Supply doesn't magically materialize - either someone pays for it with money, or someone pays for it with time not spent earning money, to provide those services or products. As your own graph demonstrates, quantity goes up regardless. What's your "new N=0 point" on the graph? My point here is not that there aren't issues with funding demand for services with inelastic supply (where large increases in price only lead to small increases in quantity, meaning little good was done.) There are such issues. Instead, my point is that these are not UBI specific issues. They're valid concerns with housing programs and rent controls today, for example. The real difference of consideration between UBI vs other social welfare programs (when taken as a whole), is how demand might change (lowering in some places while increasing in others) when the ones actually consuming the services get to direct where the dollars are spent, instead of government policymakers. In theory, replacing social welfare programs with UBI might drive demand away from elastically supplied goods and services, towards inelasticly supplied goods and services. It's far from a given, though - we have plenty of existing government programs for such inelastic things as housing. If you see some fundamental flaw of UBI that would cause demand to shift this way, I've missed it, so please do share. I'm more concerned by the other factors: On the one hand, those in need of services in many cases the ones in the best position to know what they need, so the money for those services may be spent more efficiently - especially if there's less waste in red tape bureaucracy, from government organizations unfettered from the pressures of capitalism. On the other, if you haven't learned how to manage your money, don't know about the things that could best help your situation, or are in the grips of addiction, it may be difficult for you to spend your money wisely. My understanding is that direct cash influxes to the poor in 3rd world countries has worked pretty well. It's not perfectly analogous to helping out the poor in 1st world countries via UBI, but I'm fairly hopeful it's analogous enough.
• wapapaloobop 10y ago
  This isn't why we would do it, but only 1 in 10,000 'unemployed' citizens need make a significant contribution to open source or some kind of theoretical discovery to make Basic Income a bargain investment for society as a whole.
• known 10y ago
  1. USA could have PREVENTED https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia had it initiated UBI in 1971 for rest of the world when it pegged dollar to OPEC Oil http://www.zerohedge.com/print/502779 http://www.zerohedge.com/print/502779 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_around_the_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_around_the_world provides impetus to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority will OPPOSE UBI because they fear you'll NOT be subservient to them 4. UBI is prudent distribution of cash, not wealth
• kempe 10y ago
  You could look at Sweden here for a reference. Everyone does not get a fixed sum of money but everyone can get social services to help out if you are unemployed thou the amount of money vary from situation to situation. This and other things like everyone has a right to schools, universities and health care does not come for free however. 25% tax on products, salary tax 30-55% on different salary ranges + ~15% on top for pension plan and state tax that the employee never sees that the company pays. So sure it can work but it's not cheap and it builds on that everyone should get a job. If people lost interest in that and unemployment would raise more, that would be bad...
• uhtred 10y ago
  Surely $833 a month ($10,000 a year) still wouldn't be even close to enough for someone who is unemployed to live? Wouldn't rent and bills use that up, without leaving anything for food, clothing etc? I love the idea of universal basic income, but I feel it would need to be double the amount proposed in this article to really change society for the better. Otherwise people will still need to resort to crime to extra money, seeing as there are going to be even less jobs in the future.
  • danielvf 10y ago
    I've volunteered at English as a second language classes. I've met plenty of people who live on less than that, while still having cars, smartphones, housing, and food. America has about 11 million people who legally are forbidden from having a job. Many get black market jobs paying less than minimum wage, and still have money left over to send back home.
  • jboggan 10y ago
    Why not triple it? Why not $100,000k a year for everyone?
  • habosa 10y ago
    While I also find it hard to believe, the Federal Poverty Line is $11,880 for individuals. If you make $12k a year you are not considered to be in poverty (if you live alone). So yes, 10k a year would still leave people below the current poverty line. But over 45 million americans already live below the poverty line. So evidence suggest it actually is enough to survive by some standard and may be a good place to start since it's likely that people will be able to find some supplementary income through work. In the long term the goal would be to significantly increase quality of living for all and hopefully change the horrifying numbers I just presented.
  • pyrrhotech 10y ago
    With a little planning and an abandonment of materialism, it is pretty easy to live on 10,000 a year in the US. Example: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-live-on-7000-per-year.html http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-live-on-7000-per-yea...
• nxzero 10y ago
  One thing that strikes me as a bit off is that there are a massive amount people that are "retired" but want to work. While I get that basic income is intended for a segment of the population that's able to work, seems like including a massive segment of the population that's already receiving basic income via social security AND wants to work would provide a lot of data for just the cost of measuring it; meaning the basic income is already covered.
• dilemma 10y ago
  The basic problem that makes universal basic income impossible is that it's simply not possibly to set the level of it. Have a try: 1. What should UBI be in San Francisco? 2. What should UBI be in Detroit? 3. Should they be the same? 4. What happens if they're not the same? 5. What happens if they're the same?
  • epaga 10y ago
    1. $10,000. 2. $10,000 3. Yes. 4. They would be. 5. All of the proposed benefits of UBI.
    • dilemma 10y ago
      1. Can an unemployed single parent of two support themselves and their family on $10,000 per year in San Francisco? 2. Can an unemployed single parent of two support themselves and their family on $10,000 per year in Detroit? 3. Why? 4. See 3. 5. What are the proposed benefits of UBI?
      • howeyc 10y ago
        No, it's about having enough to live in the USA. Not about having enough to live where you want at your special snowflake standard of living. Yes, you may only get enough to live awesome in "the middle of nowhere" or whatever. So what? If you want to live in San Fran, find a way to get the money to live there.
        • dilemma 10y ago
          So under UBI, if someone in San Francisco, NYC, DC, Seattle, etc. loses their job, they should move to rural Wisconsin?
          • chongli 10y ago
            Yes. Why not? When they do, it'll cause rent to drop in San Fran, NYC, DC and Seattle. The US has a staggering amount of available land. The problem with real estate is that prices are high where the jobs are located. With basic income you no longer have to live where the jobs are and can move around freely.
• rbcgerard 10y ago
  I see two basic issues: 1. How do you implement this whithout border control - if you create a basic income that is higher than ~1/2 the world's income the amount of illegal immigration will be huge 2. Will we really have the will to tell people who are starving because they lost their stipend to drugs or gambling "too bad"?
  • tome 10y ago
    These seem like key issues. In particular I really can't understand how this can be compatible with any non-negligible amount of immigration.
  • grogers 10y ago
    1. Most likely the UBI would only go to legal permanent residents. 2. It's at least no worse than today for those people. Support groups will still exist. If you distribute money frequently (e.g. weekly) it might help a little in preventing catastrophic situations where people lose it all. My concern here is that the payday loan industry grows instead of shrinking (tough to predict these types of things).
    • rbcgerard 10y ago
      1. while that is likely the case, since we grant citizenship to those born here (who i believe can then sponsor their family), the obvious choice would be to move here illegally and have children. 2. many current programs today limit what can be bought (SNAPS) or provide the service directly (low income housing), that's not to say there are not ways around this or that dollars are not fungible, but I do think there is difference
  • RobertoG 10y ago
    which one of those problems we don't have now, again?
    • rbcgerard 10y ago
      we obviously have both, which would seem to be exacerbated by such a plan.
• snomad 10y ago
  Will universal basic income take into account relative cost of living per geographical area? If so, why isn't the same done with income tax. If no, why then is it really a universal basic income / all that useful?
  • maxerickson 10y ago
    I guess different income taxes may not have them but in many tax systems, deductible expenses provide some relief for differences in cost of living.
  • undersuit 10y ago
    Many states, counties and cities in the United States already leverage their own income taxes in addition to federal income taxation. How about we let the same states, counties, and cities decide if they want to provide their own basic income addendum. And they might need to if the BI amount is great enough that a janitor in Seattle, or a maid in SF no longers sees a reason to live anywhere near a big city for a job that barely covers their financial needs, needs imposed on them by living in a big city.
• MicroBerto 10y ago
  In the early 1970s, animal behaviorist John Calhoun built a "mouse utopia" to see what would happen if he created the perfect world for mice, with unlimited food, starting with four males and four females, that could reach a population of 2500. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM What happened next is absolutely astonishing. When the mice had nothing to do and nothing to work for, their society collapsed upon itself. Females stopped caring for their young. Betas began guarding the elite females, despite them not breeding with anyone. Fights broke out for no reason whatsoever. Mice stopped eating. Their population peaked at 2200, and then died off extremely quickly. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/ It was a big, fat, giant mess. And it's exactly what will happen to us if we don't have something to work and live for. Hell, it's already happening. I don't think humanity survives with basic income as planned. We fall apart when we have nothing to do. We're no better than mice - we are still just animals with a larger hierarchy. I'd rather see unproductive humans digging and re-filling holes in the ground than getting paid to do nothing. Or something like the biking experiment in Black Mirror. Yet we need to do something as automation grows. Society is in for some serious decisions, and no country currently has the leadership to be able to tackle them.
  • minsight 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure that animal behaviour doesn't necessarily map perfectly onto human behaviour.
    • MicroBerto 10y ago
      Of course it's not perfect. But when something we're proposing has once resulted in total catastrophe (complete end of civilization), it's worth researching a hell of a lot more. This is why I feel any democracy is eventually doomed to fail. People will vote themselves more and more free stuff, but "free stuff" ultimately defeats the will of the human spirit. It's worth researching more, but everybody just seems to focus on the economic impact and not the social one. If you think this will end crime, then I have a bridge to sell to you.
• a_imho 10y ago
  Why is that ubi is considered the next big thing, while people on welfare are usually looked down upon? In the current (optimistic) horizon it might seem like a good idea, but a recession could easily spin this the wrong way imho. If you don't contribute by working and paying taxes on your income, there can be a problem when a stressed actor comes asking to justify your ubi. OTOH, if you do need to work either way, why not tweak the current distribution system and include ubi money in wages.
  • lsaferite 10y ago
    The reason many (not me) look down on things like welfare is they are not personally and directly benefitting while some other person is and they aren't perceived as working to deserve the benefit. The idea with UBI is that you no longer make the government assistance a merit based assistance and instead everyone gets it equally. For those with large incomes the small amount of UBI will be a pittance. For those with little or no income it will be a lifeline. In both cases the amount would be exactly the same.
• branchless 10y ago
  Land value tax. Basic income will raise rents. Tax land not labour. http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/ http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/
• coderKen 10y ago
  First world problems.
• _Understated_ 10y ago
  There is something else to consider too: The political party that brings this in will likely be in power for a really long time! Think about the consequences: Even if it was proven financial suicide for the country (Governments can always print more money I suppose and let the next generation deal with the fallout), what political party would have a manifesto abolishing or reducing it? It would be political suicide.
  • clarkmoody 10y ago
    It already is political suicide to mention cutting any entitlement. This is the fundamental flaw of democracy.
• dools 10y ago
  A universal basic income is inferior to a job guarantee: http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2013/07/09/how-big-is-big-enough-would-the-basic-income-guarantee-satisfy-the-unemployed/ http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2013/07/09/how-big-is-big... http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/01/16-reasons-matt-yglesias-wrong-job-guarantee-vs-basic-income.html http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/01/16-reasons-matt-y... https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/comments/3ne2iu/randall_wray_mmt_economist_against_basic_income/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/comments/3ne2iu/randall...? http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=13025 http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=13025
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • amai 10y ago
    A job guarantee like they had it in the the former https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc ?
    • dools 10y ago
      No, that was under a communist dictatorship. That was 100% government employment to the exclusion of the private purpose. It was a centrally planned economy where the government determined what everyone should do at all times. A Job Guarantee, on the other hand (which I'll explain because you obviously didn't look at any of the links I posted in my initial comment, but rather went off your pre-existing opinions) is a guarantee by the government that if the private sector will not or can not employ someone, they will be given a good job by the government. I won't bother providing additional links, you're obviously only interested in dealing with straw men.
• xiphias 10y ago
  The more free money printing is going on, the more I'm incentivized to buy/use Bitcoins from my hard work's money. UBI centralizes power to the money printers even more, gives a little to those who don't work (for their votes), and takes even more money away from those who work. Still, this can go on only with central banking.
• ck2 10y ago
  Millions can't even get health insurance in half of the entire USA (24 vs 26 states do not have medicaid expansion because the supreme court ruled it was okay to screw everyone over). Good luck with this basic income fantasy. Might as well try to negotiate reparations for slavery. How about you finish what was started FIRST - and don't give me this "we can do multiple things at the same time" nonsense. This is six years later. The need for health care is pretty much universally understood. Giving people free money would never get out of congress.
• alexvoda 10y ago
  I think the issue with BI is that no matter how many things are automated and how many items become abundent there are still things that will remain scarce: land, minerals. Land will remain a scarce resource and all things that depend primarily on land will remain scarce (housing, agriculture, etc.). And in this situation there is nothing stopping land owners from absorbing the basic income. This means that revenue generated by land owning (not necessarily land owning itself) would have to be heavily taxed. Maybe even taxed progressively to avoid economies of scale in land owning and prevent a very few from owning all the land. Or we could terraform celestial bodies in the Solar system. It is important to note that land itself is limited, not housing. As long as we can continue building even higher and deeper housing is not actually limited.
  • mattgibson 10y ago
    For this reason, I think Basic income really only makes sense when paired with land value tax (LVT) and rent caps, which would prevent that problem. Both already work well in other economies in Europe.
• discardorama 10y ago
  OK, so you introduce UBI. Yay! Now what happens to all the social workers employed by the city (say, SF)? Remember: SF spends ~$35K/homeless/year. Who pays when a homeless guy ODs and needs hospitalization? Right now government housing is subsidized for the poor (some people in SF pay $35/mo for a 2BR government apartment). Do we still have these subsidies after UBI? What about food stamps? And the 10M+ illegal immigrants?
• jrcii 10y ago
  Abolish all welfare, phase out social security, and have the poor rely on private charities. If people don't want to donate to the charities that's their choice, it's their money. You're not entitled to money, food, a home, or a job -- you're entitled to nothing. You're entitled to starve in the gutter. If you want something more you have to earn it or have someone voluntarily agree to give it to you out of their own free will.
  • chongli 10y ago
    Likewise, nobody should be entitled to police or military protection. If you've got a lot of money, you better hire a very large and trustworthy private security force to protect it because otherwise I'm going to take it from you.
  • habosa 10y ago
    If you live in the United States, that's not the social contract we've agreed upon and you should leave if you feel that way. As a citizen of the US we have decided to collect taxes to provide certain services for the common good. You are free to fend for yourself in many parts of the world. But not if you like that blue passport.
• ComteDeLaFere 10y ago
  A basic income fails on the same point as increasing the minimum wage - neither provides much additional opportunity in life, both simply make being poor and disenfranchised more palatable.
• maxxxxx 10y ago
  This is such a nice distraction from solving any real issues. While people are debating basic income wages will keep stagnating and big companies are hoarding money in tax shelters. But hey, let's discuss basic income.
• nazgob 10y ago
  Does such tests as the one made in Kenya make sense at all? Having external money injected into local economy will have a different effect that taxing that economy and then redistributing part of it in form of UBI.
• jboggan 10y ago
  'In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."' :Rudyard Kipling [0] 0 - http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm
• WWKong 10y ago
  How does a universal basic income work from economics stand point? Let's say everyone gets $1000/mo. Currently the market knows that everyone has $10 and prices bread accordingly at $1.50. Tomorrow the market will know that everyone has $1010 and will price the bread at $100. Thus everything from food to utilities to rent gets adjusted to the new normal and the poor can't still afford the basics. Is this theory not correct?
  • habosa 10y ago
    Take a step further. Let's say on day 1 of the basic income age all the bread merchants raise their price to $100. One smart bread merchant will probably say "Hey I used to sell this for $1.50, I can do better than $100" and prices it at $90. Now everyone buys bread from him. The other merchants feel the price pressure and the cycle continues, with the price settling down to something likely higher than $1.50 (to reflect the increased price of labor input as a result of basic income) but not so high that it totally eats the increased income. So yes, things will cost more after basic income (after all you'd likely need some sort of inflation to find the money to give away). But in an efficient market they will not cost so much more than people are not still effectively richer than they were before. It does not change the intrinsic value of most things, it just makes certain inputs (namely labor) more expensive.
    • WWKong 10y ago
      In other words, utilities and commodities will always hover around cost price due to market forces and hence the poor will be able to afford the basics. There might be other non essentials that might become more expensive to absorb the extra money in the market, but we would have mostly likely solved a bigger problem. Makes sense. I still worry about housing.
      • habosa 10y ago
        Housing is interesting because it's one of the few things we buy that is priced mostly around our ability to pay for it rather than the value of what we are buying. That's why in SF it seems that housing prices rise in lock step with wages in the dominant industry (tech). So while it's very likely that the cost of housing will increase in this situation, again I think people will still be better off overall. People will have increased purchasing power for non-housing goods and still pay the same percentage of their income for housing, even if that is now a percentage of a larger number.
• narrator 10y ago
  I think this is sort of the apotheosis of the concept that money is the universally effective solution to all problems. Money is not the universally effective solution to health care in this country. We already spend double, as a percent of GDP ,compared to any other country. I think we're going to run into some problems on the supply side with a universal basic income. Some prices will rise due to increased consumption. This will make capital investment (e.g Research and Development, New Factories, Upgrading Production Equipment) more costly. Eventually you'll burn the furniture to heat the house and then things will start to fall apart and get into an inflationary spiral. It does have the benefit going for it that it is less complex to administer though, while our health care system is enormously complex and grows ever more complex with the more money that gets spent on it.
• dimino 10y ago
  All of this is basically moot, because while the average person's entitlements might stay the same or increase due to a basic income to cover the things entitlements currently cover (we won't need to hand out food stamps if we have a basic income, for example), every other person's entitlements they rely on will get cut as a result, and those people (and there are at least tens of millions of them) will raise unholy hell about it. There's the 10% for each entitlement that need the full entitlement, and there are dozens of entitlements, hundreds, so 10% of hundreds of programs will just be too many people to allow a basic blanket income to cover their entitlements. All that said, my favorite version of this is the "negative income tax". We have something kind of like it already, but the EITC would have to be expanded significantly before it was actually something like a negative income tax, and that means cuts to other programs.
• irrational 10y ago
  I make more than $100,000 a year, but I'd gladly quit if I had a basic income that let me lay around at home all day and read library books.
  • scld 10y ago
    And you would be replaced by someone who likes to travel to tropical beaches to sit and read books all day :)
    • aminok 10y ago
      It would reduce the supply of highly skill labour, which would reduce the amount of goods/services produced, and as a consequence, the amount of wealth the world gets to consume. You're making the 'lump of labour fallacy' in assuming that someone will just take his stop with no loss.
• Animats 10y ago
  The Bloomberg version of basic income means a minimal payment and an end to most need-based welfare programs. The guy who drinks up his benefits can just die on the street.
• shams93 10y ago
  10,000 isn't basic income its like slightly more than welfare for a basic income to be meaningful in a city like los angeles you're talking at least 70k if a person has even any hope of having a roommate situation. The other alternative is to give everybody everything they need in life at no cost, but 10k in los angeles is a joke, if they tax it you're talking still talking about having a choice between food and a youth hostel bed on that low an income.
  • shams93 10y ago
    We've had this 10k basic income since the 1930s its called welfare, to reiterate what I just said basic income has to secure a middle class lifestyle for it to be meaningful.
  • jypepin 10y ago
    > "at least 70k" you gotta get back on earth man. When I got my first job in San Francisco I was making 65k, had 1 roommate in a nice apartment in the Mission, lived well, and was still able to save money. And LA is cheaper than SF.
  • scld 10y ago
    You wouldn't need to live in a city like Los Angeles. Without job security to tie you to a location, you would move to areas of the country/state where cost of living was lowest. Additionally, if you wanted to live a middle class lifestyle, you would have a job. That's the incentive to keep working. The basic income is to keep people at an above-poverty income level, not to keep everyone at middle class. In fact, the mere definition of the term means you couldn't have everyone at middle class.
• Animats 10y ago
  The next big thing, after the $15 minimum wage, should be the 8 hour day and the 40 hour week. Everybody gets overtime, unless you're in the 1%. The whole "exempt" thing needs to go.
  • elihu 10y ago
    I agree that everyone who goes over 40 hours should get overtime, but I also think the standard work week should be reduced from 40 hours.
    • Animats 10y ago
      One step at a time. A 40 hour work week is politically sellable. After all, we used to have it, so it's "conservative".
• ja30278 10y ago
  I really don't understand how a 'basic' income is supposed to work. What if I spend my basic income on drugs and hookers? are you willing to let me starve? what about my kids? If not, then the basic income can't actually replace the existing social programs. If nobody need to work, then if employers want employees, they have to pay more to get them, which makes prices rise, which makes your 'basic' income insufficient again. I don't get it.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > I really don't understand how a 'basic' income is supposed to work. Its like the Alaska Permanent Fund[1], but with a broader -- and by design growing with the economy -- revenue base. > What if I spend my basic income on drugs and hookers? are you willing to let me starve? what about my kids? If not, then the basic income can't actually replace the existing social programs. Sure, it can still replace existing social benefit programs. For your kids, well, we already have provisions for taking children from the care of parents that abuse or fail to provide for them, and putting them in the care of the State with the parent responsible for support costs; allowing either redirecting the children's basic income from the parent to the new support provider (in a system where children have basic income) or diverting some defined portion the parent's basic income (in a system where children do not get allotted their own BI) to pay support costs is quite natural; this doesn't create an additional social benefit program. As for you, some BI supporters would let you starve. Others might support having transitional food/shelter programs (which would be an additional short-term benefit program) available to avoid people falling through the cracks, but make the beneficiary responsible for the cost (possibly diverting some share of future BI payments until that debt was paid). > If nobody need to work, then if employers want employees, they have to pay more to get them, which makes prices rise, which makes your 'basic' income insufficient again. Under realistic assumptions about elasticity, Basic Income would have some effect on accelerating price inflation of goods demanded at the low end of the income distribution, which would mean that the quality of life any level of UBI could sustain with no outside income would be somewhat less than one would expect with the same amount of income before the UBI became available. But overall, those receiving the UBI would be able to afford more than without it. Further, UBI can cut employer costs (while it reduces economic duress to work, it also reduces the need for a minimum wage and many UBI proposals have it replace the minimum wage; it also means bad-fit employees will have less resistance to moving on, and that people will generally have more freedom to seek optimum job fits -- which are good for workers, but also most productive for employers.) And most people don't just work enough to meet basic necessities if they are capable of getting more, so most people able to do economically useful work probably would even with a UBI that met basic needs -- people like luxuries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
• williesleg 10y ago
  Nice way to trigger inflation as all that new found cash is spent on crap imported from China.
• saiya-jin 10y ago
  communism. everybody was forced to have a job, hence income. once you leave market forces driving the direction and try to force some righteous system down the throat of whole society, no exceptions taken, many bad things will happen. a lot of very unfair situations will occur in the system that aims to do the opposite. I mean, by all means, do it, experiment on your society, take all the risks foreseen and unforeseen. if you manage to make first 50 years in glory (or 100 to be sure), you have my attention. just please, please don't shove it down my throat in country where me or my family lives. Please. Thank you. where is the push for better education and more accessible healthcare? Fixing those guarantees a brighter future for mankind, period. this is roulette where you can lose a lot, gain a lot too.
• googletazer 10y ago
  I'm for basic income, however looking beyond it - whats really necessary is to be able to let each person discover their (productive) passion to be able to contribute and exchange their time and labor for some unit of value. 99% of people will still be competing for the same thing - food, housing, transportation, low level luxuries. With demand getting stronger, UNLESS the people receiving basic income get creative and produce the things they need, expanding the pie, the prices for them will go up. Overall, tastes are infinite, I'd love to drive a tesla and live in a (multi?)million dollar mansion, but I can't. They are too expensive for me - meaning my work and labor doesn't produce enough value (or may be not valued appropriately - but this a whole other topic) to exchange for those things I want. If we want more people to drive teslas and live in mansions, everybody who will be getting UBI needs to get productive to increase the amounts of teslas and mansions in existence.
• aidenn0 10y ago
  > And they fear that a basic income would, in the end, be less than what many people get when all the federal government's cash and social-service programs are combined. Note that the poor will obviously get fewer benefits if BI is only funded from cuts to programs the benefit the poor. Example: lets say we eliminate program X that currently has a means test limiting it to the poorest 20% of the population. If we, as the article suggests, use that money to fond some fraction of BI for the poorest 80% of the population, then one can trivially see that we have distributed 3/4 of the money for program X away from the poorest 20%. Now there are significant savings from reducing overhead, but unless program X is 75% overhead, it's still a net loss in realized benefits for the poor. In order to make BI palatable to the US left, you will need to fund it at least partly through raising taxes.
• gerbilly 10y ago
  I would be for this but I'm afraid that once all the other programs are dismantled, food stamps, welfare etc, that the poor might end up getting less support than they did before. I try hard not to be cynical, but I wonder if this isn't a ruse to accomplish exactly that. I mean the US is known for being "frugal" when it comes to helping people. See the medical system for example, or the treatment that veterans get. Why the sudden surge in generosity, why the sudden desire to redistribute income? Weren't these anathema just recently, even to some democrats? Also the fact that it keeps coming up in the media makes me slightly suspicious. Why is this being promoted so much right now? I bet there are PR firms out there calling newspaper reporters and bloggers, to promote coverage of this idea on behalf of who knows which group or organization. [1] [1]: http://www.prwatch.org/ http://www.prwatch.org/
• mindcrime 10y ago
  Find a way to do it without using force, or threat of force, and I'll be on board. Otherwise, any UBI proposal is a non-starter in my book.
• yuzi 10y ago
  Side question: what prevents a basic income from being a driving force behind an inflation jump making the system less stable? For example: rent. Wouldn't landlords managing properties at the low end of the market price, raise those prices knowing people both 1. have more distribution control over their money (cash vs. coupons for things) and 2. More people in their target market have cash to pay.
• xufi 10y ago
  Let people fend off for themselves. That's what we do anyways when terror strikes. Imagine a post acolypatic world everyone fends for themselves are work hard for it.
• shamus 10y ago
  I agree
• shamus 10y ago
  Testing
• lmedina 10y ago
  Why not have repayable assistance? The government gives you money for up to 5 years until you get a job, and then you have to pay the government back. You pay the government back a small percentage of your monthly paycheck, say 0.05%, no interest. It's basically an interest free loan with a long repayment schedule. But at least the government gets something back.
• ascotan 10y ago
  This concept would simply create inflation. Image everyone has $10 on island A. Island B sells coconuts and the going rate for a coconut is $1. Based on other bills the islanders need to pay for, $1 fits the average budget and is what people are willing to pay for coconuts. Now make everyone on island A have $100. The demand for coconuts rises but people on island B soon realize they can make more money by raising prices even though they sell less units. They eventually increase the price of coconuts to $10 because that ends up being the price point at which the Island B people are making the most money. Therefore by increasing the income of everyone by a factor of 10, you end up increase the prices by a factor of 10. There is some lag time where prices will balance out though, so if you just kept doing this every month you might have a period of faux prosperity but you would also be creating runaway inflation.
  • Chinjut 10y ago
    We would not be increasing everyone's income by the same factor. People with less money would see their income rise by a larger factor than people with more money. Thus, for example, if you have $0 pre-BI and $X post-BI, with X > 0, there's no amount of inflation that will cancel out the fact that you've benefited.
• aminok 10y ago
  Entrenching authoritarianism should NOT be the next big thing. Compulsory basic income requires throwing people who refuse to hand over currency they receive in private trade in prison, where they are kept in small enclosures, and often develop mental illness, and suffer physical and sexual abuse. Techies should not support such a dark, authoritarian vision for the future.
  • Buge 10y ago
    I don't understand your comment. By "hand over currency they receive in private trade" are you referring to taxes? Taxes already exist without basic income. The punishment for tax evasion does not necessarily have to increase because of basic income.
    • aminok 10y ago
      Yes. Specifically, I'm referring to taxes on income and sales. A basic income would most likely require taxes to increase and at the very least will make us more dependent on these taxes.
• nitroxxls 10y ago
  Taxation Is Theft. NO ONE will take my money without my consent to sponsor millions of LAZY people. There are dozens of countries without taxes. You will not get a penny from me.
• nitroxxls 10y ago
  USA = COMMUNISM
• michaelbuddy 10y ago
  Problem is there's a large number of people who work hard, produce and frankly don't look too kindly on those who don't. Why is it so hard to understand that when we don't have to do something, a lot of people won't do anything but frivolous non productive activities, while unabashedly leeching off those who like to work for profit, progress and frankly to make life interesting for them, their community and the future of all.
• TrevorJ 10y ago
  The problem is, this doesn't happen in a vacuum: how do you prevent rent-seeking and COL inflation? Not universal basic income works in a free market, you may have to control prices directly in order to do it.